Slides (PDF): Download

Resources

GitHub Pages

Free hosting for small websites, decoupled from current institutional affiliation (but dependent on the continued generosity of a private company). GitHub Pages can automatically run Jekyll for you (see the section on static site generators).

Domainr

Check for availability of a domain name quickly.

Static site generators

Static site generators run once after you update your site and regenerate any modified HTML pages. Maintenance and performance wise, static HTML pages are way nicer than dynamically generated sites (think, in order of decade: SSI, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.).

Jekyll is written in Ruby and has pretty good documentation.

Pelican is written in Python and has a comparable feature set, but the documentation is a bit confusing. (I like the template syntax it uses a little more.)

Experimenting with HTML/CSS/JS

Two useful sites for experimenting with HTML markup, CSS, or JavaScript code (e.g. to produce a minimal example of some issue you have) are jsfiddle.net (which I showed) and CodePen.io. They offer a multi-panel editor where you can see the resulting page in the same browser window.